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An anonymous reader writes "The KWin window manager maintainer for KDE is looking at removing the legacy OpenGL 1.0 renderer from the KWin code-base due to the costs of supporting legacy hardware. This means dropping support for non-GL2+ graphics cards, which are all over six years old, but in the process would mean that for now there is no longer any support for the AMD Catalyst driver on the KDE desktop. Due to driver bugs, AMD's proprietary Catalyst software only works well with the GL1 renderer even though their latest hardware supports OpenGL 4."

Meanwhile you could just use the open source drivers for many older ATI cards and have OpenGL 2.1, greater stability, and decent performance. Desktop effects work and full-screen Flash videos play better than on XP.

And for the most part, those that say the open source drivers suck are basing their opinions on their experiences from 6+ years ago or some bullshit Phronix article that benchmarks functionality that you might not even care about if you take a rational look at what you actually use the machine for. If you're not trying to do much 3D gaming the open source drivers are fantastic. If you are trying to game on Linux... forget about it if you own an ATI card. Been that way for a very long time; Catalyst has always been a suck fest.

TLDR: Nvida blob if you want to do everything, including gaming, on Linux. Open source ATI or Intel will more than fit the bill for anything else (except 3D gaming) you might want to do... even KWin.